Millions of Bitcoin users store their bitcoins with online exchanges (e.g. Coinbase, Kraken) which store bitcoins on their customers’ behalf. They present an interface that looks somewhat like an online bank, allowing users to log in and request payments to other users or withdrawals. For many users this approach makes a lot more sense than the traditional approach of storing private keys on your laptop or phone and interacting with the Bitcoin network directly. Online exchanges require no software installation, enable a familiar password-based authentication model, and can guard against the risk of losing funds with a stolen laptop. Online exchanges can also improve the scalability and efficiency of Bitcoin by settling many logical transactions between users without actually moving funds on the block chain.

Of course, users must trust these exchanges not to get hacked or simply abscond with their money, both of which happened frequently in the early days of Bitcoin (nearly half of exchanges studied in a 2013 research paper failed). Famously, Mt. Gox was the largest online exchange until 2014 when it lost most of its customers’ funds under murky circumstances.

It has long been a goal of the Bitcoin community for exchanges to be able to cryptographically prove solvency—that is, to prove that they still control enough bitcoins to cover all of their customers’ accounts. Greg Maxwell first proposed an approach using Merkle treesin 2013, but this requires revealing (at a minimum) the total value of the exchange’s assets and which addresses the exchange controls. Exchanges have specifically cited these privacy risks as a reason they have not deployed proofs of solvency, relying on trusted audit instead.

In a new paper presented this month at CCS (co-authored with Gaby G. Dagher, Benedikt Bünz, Jeremy Clark and Dan Boneh), we present Provisions, the first cryptographic proof-of-solvency with strong privacy guarantees. Our protocol is suitable for Bitcoin but would work for most other cryptocurrencies (e.g. Litecoin, Ethereum). Our protocol hides the total assets and liabilities of the exchange, proving only that assets are strictly greater than liabilities. If desired, the value of this surplus can be proven. Provisions also hides all customer balances and hides which Bitcoin addresses the bank controls within a configurable anonymity set of other addresses on the block chain. The proofs are large, but reasonable to compute on a daily basis (in the tens of GB for a large exchange, computable in about an hour). Best of all, it is very simple and fast for each user to verify that they have been correctly included. We can even extend the protocol to prevent collusion between exchanges. The details are in the paper, the full version of which is now online.

While our Provisions protocol removes the privacy concerns of performing a cryptographic proof-of-solvency, there are still some practical deployment questions because the proof requires the exchange to compute using its private keys. Exchanges rightly go to great lengths to protect these keys, often keeping them offline and/or in hardware security modules. Performing a regular solvency proof requires careful thinking about the right internal procedure for accessing these keys.

These deployment questions can be solved. We hope that cryptographic proofs of solvency will soon be expected of upstanding exchanges. Incidents like that of Mt. Gox have greatly damaged public perception of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. While solvency proofs can’t prevent exchange compromises, they would have made Mt. Gox’s troubles public earlier and more clearly. They would also shore up confidence in today’s exchanges which are (presumably) solvent.

Taking a step back, solvency proofs are yet another example where we can replace an expensive and trust-laden process in the offline world (financial inspection by a trusted auditor) with a “trustless” cryptographic protocol. It’s always exciting to take a new step in that direction. There remain limits as to what cryptography can do though. Critically, solvency proofs do not create a binding obligation to pay. A malicious exchange could complete a Provisions proof and then immediately abscond with all of the money. For this reason, some form of government regulation of online exchanges makes sense. Though regulation is dreaded by many in the Bitcoin community, it appears to be on the horizon. Bills have been proposed in several states, largely aimed at exchanges. Interestingly, the model regulatory framework proposed by the Conference of State Bank Supervisors in September already mentions cryptographic solvency proofs as a means of demonstrating solvency. We hope this recommendation is enacted in law and solvency proofs are a tool to avoid the cost of the heavyweight auditing requirements traditionally demanded of banks, while simultaneously increasing transparency for exchange customers.

Yesterday, a new messaging app called Zendo got some very favorable coverage from Tech Crunch. At the core of their sales pitch is the fact that they use one-time pads for encryption. With a few strong assumptions, namely that the pads are truly random and are only used once, it’s true that this scheme is “unbreakable” or more precisely that it offers information-theoretic guarantees that no eavesdropper can learn anything about the encrypted message. Zendo’s founder calls it a “crypto unicorn” and claims it is a game-changer in terms of security.

It isn’t. In this post I’ll explain why we don’t need (and shouldn’t want) to use one-time pads for a consumer secure-messaging app and why we should generally be wary of products like Zendo making grandiose claims about solving security problems through magic crypto. [Read more…]

Following the revelations of wide-scale surveillance by US intelligence agencies and their allies, a myriad of services offering end-to-end encrypted communications have cropped up to take advantage of the increasing demand for privacy from surveillance. When coupled with anonymity, end-to-end encryption can prevent a central service provider from obtaining any information about its users or their communications. However, maintaining anonymity is difficult while simultaneously offering a straightforward way for users to find each other.

Enter Wickr. This startup offers a simple app featuring “military grade encryption” of text, photo, video, and voice messages as well as anonymous registration for its users. Wickr claims that it cannot identify who has registered with the service or which of its users are communicating with each other. During registration, users enter their email address and/or phone number (non-Wickr IDs). The app utilizes a cryptographic hash function (SHA-256 in this case) to obtain “anonymous” Wickr IDs from the non-Wickr IDs. Wickr IDs are then stored server-side and used for discovery. When your friends want to find you, they enter your phone number or email address, which is then put through the same hash function, resulting in the same output (Wickr ID). Wickr looks this up in its database to determine if you’ve registered with the service to facilitate message exchange. This process simplifies the discovery of other users, supposedly without Wickr having the ability to identify the users of the anonymous service.

The problem here is that while it’s not always possible to determine the input to a hash function given the output, we can leverage the fact that the same input always yields the same output. If the number of possible inputs is small, we can simply try all of them. Unfortunately, this is a recurring theme in a variety of applications as a result of misunderstanding cryptography — specifically, the fact that hash functions are not one-way if the input space is small. A great explanation on the use of cryptographic hash functions in attempts to anonymize data can be found here.[Read more…]

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